Next week, traffic will stop and everything will happen. Sidewalks will be clogged with men and women wearing lanyards and ID tags. It will be impossible to get a coffee without a 30 minute wait.
And today, Friday, the whole day has been full of the nervous anticipation to get it all done, finish it all off.
Now, at a quarter past six, there is no one left and the office is empty and darkness of evening has fallen.
I should’ve gone home long ago, too, but I’ve hung out to see the ends of things. So now I stand at the table with an art director who has spent the last 9 hours on last minute requests. I ask if he needs help. He tells me he needs to fold a brochure by hand because it’s too late to get to CopyMat.
“I don’t trust them anyway,” he says.
In two weeks, after the traffic has restarted, and the lanyards have been taken off to be hung on the corners of cubicle walls, and you can get coffee again in just 5 minutes, I’ll come through these hallways for the last time because I’ve agreed to help others in another office for another company. All day people have noted it, wondered why I’m in the office. They’ve laughed a little at the absurdity of my presence. “Short timer, “ one says snarkily.
But I can’t help myself. I’ve spent too much time helping these people get to this point, trying to create the space to help them see what they can do.
And that is what I am thinking about as the evening closes in and I help the art director fold the brochures.
One fold, then another. Then another. A neat little pocket guide that will mean 2000 folds, all by hand.
We both know that it’s unlikely that the brochure will change the course of the events trajectory. It’s even more unlikely that it will ever be remembered that we folded this paper by hand, simply because the art director doesn’t trust CopyMat.
Do I have to be here? No, not really.
But it will help the art director get to a dinner he wants to go to that he’d miss if he were folding alone. And then the brochures will be done and that will help others on Monday let their focus go somewhere more important, too.
So I ask, do I have to be here? And I know I couldn’t be anywhere else, right now.
